Selma is a beautiful film beautifully made and could not arrive at a more appropriate time in our nation’s history. Selma depicts a world in which we as a nation invest time and energy fighting foreign wars while neglecting our own people at home. Sound familiar? This core message in the film resonates today as it did then, and it is delivered flawlessly.

I won’t go into the recent Oscar controversy surrounding the film, but I do concur with those who feel the film’s lead actors and director not being nominated is a gross oversight. Like so many modern films depicting historic situations, Selma suffers from some genre clichés: collapsing too many complex issues into a glib exchange or two, projecting the passage of time chiefly through changes in wardrobe and hairstyle, giving us historical figures who sometime seem as if they walked out of a book of paper dolls.

However, and this is key, Selma is written and directed with a sharp eye toward how far we think we’ve come yet how little we’ve actually achieved when it comes to human rights in America. We are a country that celebrates freedom and equality but thrives economically on an ingrained caste system, which is based on race and ethnicity and gender and age, all superficial qualities ultimately irrelevant to one’s true value. The film wisely focuses on an episode in Martin Luther King‘s storied career (the march on Selma) as a means of understanding the man and his role in history, rather than doing the tired lifetime-crammed-into-three-hours biopic approach of yore.

Director Ava DuVernay stacks the deck with a cast that is both credible and compelling. David Oyelowo so inhabits the soul and voice and mannerisms of Martin Luther King, you forget at times that you’re watching an actor (let alone a Brit) portray one of our greatest historical figures. Carmen Ejogo (another Brit!) offers a Coretta Scott King who is flinty and self-possessed, gracious and justifiably exhausted in the face of harrowing trials both domestic and public.

Tom Wilkinson (Brit number three!) as a blustering, well-intentioned, frustrated and frustrating LBJ and Tim Roth (Brit number four!) as misguided/misanthropic political animal George Wallace round out a terrific cast. All are dynamite. With great nuance, Oprah Winfrey, one of the film’s producers (and not a Brit), plays a pivotal (if small) role in Annie Lee Cooper , whose efforts to gain the right to vote are the essential issue at play in King’s historic march from Selma to Montgomery.

Unlike Lee Daniels’ The Butler, which presented another take on the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Selma does not fall prey to its own high-minded aspirations. The filmmakers are not afraid to show King warts and all (his philandering is addressed in a quietly powerful confrontation between Coretta and her husband) or even to imply that King is as much a political opportunist as those white leaders both alongside and in opposition to his efforts. DuVernay lets her lens show King in a number of lights: noble, maddeningly self-serving, obtuse, kind. I found that approach refreshing, educational, and enlightening, particularly as I continue to scratch my head at the decision-making of our world’s current leaders.

In the film, King, in his climactic speech in Montgomery, uses the phrase “a vicious lie as placation,” impugning the very nature of a system that pushes one class down to the benefit of another. This insidious concept continues to corrupt our ability to peacefully coexist, both among ourselves as Americans and with all other denizens of the world; viewing Selma could be part of the antidote: instructive, heart rending, and essential

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Reel Roy Reviews 2

Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital)

11 days left until the official release of ReelRoyReviews, a book of film, music, and theatre reviews, by Roy Sexton!

…Holy mackerel! For one brief shining moment (probably passed already by the time you read this), Reel Roy Reviews is #1 (!) in sales on Amazon’s list of best-selling movie guides and reviews. Don’t know how long this will last, so check out the photographic proof here!

Here is a snippet from Roy’s review of The Butler: “In a summer movie season populated by superheroes, robots, anthropomorphic planes, and Jennifer Aniston, Lee Daniels’s The Butler is a welcome respite. The film is an actors’ showcase with a powerful message that we are not as far removed from systemic, institutionalized brutality and bullying as we might like to believe.”

“In America, we turn a blind eye to how badly we treat our own, while pointing the finger at other countries’ abuse of their people.”

I paraphrase one of the more thematically powerful statements made by Forest Whitaker as the titular character “Cecil Gaines” in Lee Daniels’ latest The Butler.

The film fictionalizes the true story of a butler in the White House who served (literally) every president from Eisenhower to Reagan.

The movie is good … quite good actually. While not as much of an emotional gut punch as Daniels’ superior Precious, the movie embraces its melodramatic DNA and paints a compelling portrait of an African-American family unraveling at the seams against the backdrop of America’s ongoing civil rights struggles. Like Precious, however,The Butler suffers from an overly episodic structure and crazy-Love-Boat-guess-who-is-playing-the-next-cameo-role stunt casting.

(I must say, though, that Mariah Carey owes Daniels a whole lotta love for whatever magic trick he has pulled to make her seem like an accomplished actress. No lie. Glitter? A foggy, foggy memory now. A true public service to us all.)

So back to that quote. With that statement (made, unfortunately, while Whitaker and his cinematic wife Oprah Winfrey are both attired in satiny track suits – the 80s! – and saddled with some pretty dodgy old age makeup), Cecil sums up the movie’s big idea … and it’s a doozy. We are a nation of hypocrites, spreading the gospel of freedom, human rights, and dignity across the globe while depriving those self-same ideals from our own tax-paying citizenry.

The film’s structure, contrived as can be, offers point/counterpoint as Cecil interacts with a rogues’ gallery of Commanders-in-Chief, all of whom turn to Cecil at some point, asking his opinion on key moments in civil rights history (usually while he is handing them a cup of tea or something – seriously).

Simultaneously, in a feat of the kind of logic that only appears in Oscar-bait movies like this (or Forrest Gump), Cecil’s oldest son Louis is an active participant in each and every one of those key moments: he’s at the lunch counter sit-in; he’s on the Freedom Bus; he’s with Martin Luther King, Jr.; he’s a Black Panther. And, by the way, Cecil’s other son ends up enlisting for Vietnam for some inexplicable reason, mostly so the audience has a touch point for that bit of our history as well.

The fact that the film is so compelling (and doesn’t buckle under the weight of this tv-movie-esque structure) is a testament to Daniels’ exceptional cast. And what a cast! Each president (and one First Lady) get the Hollywood treatment, with the weaker links being Robin Williams as Ike and Alan Rickman as Ronnie and the best being Liev Schreiber as LBJ (I would actually watch that spin-off movie, and I don’t like LBJ) and John Cusack as Tricky Dick.

I got a big kick from Jane Fonda as Nancy Reagan – there is a spiky sweetness she brings to the brief minutes she is onscreen. Because of Daniels, I’ve become a fan of Lenny Kravitz as an actor (never much cared for him as a musician). Kravitz, as one of Cecil’s fellow White House butlers, is by no means a master thespian but he has presence – warm, welcoming, and good with a quip. Cuba Gooding, Jr., on the other hand, as another colleague of Cecil’s is grating, which is as much a function of his unnecessarily vulgar lines as of his performance.

Whitaker and Winfrey are the film’s heart. The best moments of the film are those depicting them as husband and wife, consumed by the caustic sadness and bitter anger generated living in a world that marginalizes their humanity while draining their souls.

I’m not necessarily a fan of either performer; I often find them hammy and self-absorbed, but in this film they are both grounded and compelling, with their more indulgent tendencies a welcome flourish on an, at times, overripe script.

In a summer movie season populated by superheroes, robots, anthropomorphic planes, and … Jennifer Aniston, Lee Daniels’ The Butler is a welcome respite. The film is an actors’ showcase with a powerful message that we are not as far removed from systemic, institutionalized brutality and bullying as we might like to believe.